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All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright © 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use.

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My synonym hell | Mind your language | Media | guardian.co.uk

from the Guardian:

Pronouns are good, popular orange vegetables are bad. Confused? Allow me to explain.

One of the joys of being a subeditor is getting stuck into a ream of copy littered with gratuitous synonyms hogging space that should really be given over to facts. My first instinct is to get rid; sometimes, however, I revel in the writer’s inventiveness and leave them be.

But a popular orange vegetable? A carrot, of course; and apparently we’re talking about one going down well in the carrot community, orange in hue and belonging to the group of foodstuffs known as vegetables. Fascinating stuff, you might say. Or not.

Yet this phrase is well-known among a group of hungry subeditors on Guardian news – it’s a Pov for short – and was coined in honour of the arresting example that triggered my awareness of such nonsense when, as a former reporter turned subeditor on the Liverpool Echo, I was fast getting to grips with the nuances of subbing.

In a feature on the health benefits of eating carrots, the second par did indeed begin: “The popular orange vegetables …” Well, we sort of know that. Besides, what’s wrong with “they”? Much shorter, sweeter and doesn’t get stuck in the throat. The newsdesk was in uproar. The senior subs were in stitches – and I knew instinctively that I’d made the right move. These things mattered – and they still do.

[more] via My synonym hell | Mind your language | Media | guardian.co.uk.

Wales is not quite sure how to take this.

from the Guardian:

Jeremy Clarkson had a point – and that’s not something you hear me say every day indeed, any day – when in a recent Sun column he challenged the scientists or “eco-ists” as Jezza termed them who had described a slab of ice that had broken away from Antarctica as “the size of Luxembourg”.

“I’m sorry but Luxembourg is meaningless,” said Clarkson, pointing out that the standard units of measurement in the UK are double-decker London buses, football pitches and Wales. He could have added the Isle of Wight, Olympic-sized swimming pools and Wembley stadiums to the list.

A Guardian letter writer, commenting on the same story, endorsed the argument: “I would have had some difficulty even if the chunk had been described in terms of the size of Wales. Could you tell us how big it was in football pitches or Olympic swimming pools?”

As Nancy Banks-Smith has noted: “Any plague spot of indeterminate location is always compared to Wales. Wales is not quite sure how to take this.”

[more] via Mind your language: Wales, Belgium and other units of measurement | Media | The Guardian.

Generation B – Father and Daughter Bond by Years of Reading

A wonderful story about reading from the NYT:

WHEN Jim Brozina’s older daughter, Kathy, was in fourth grade, he was reading Beverly Cleary’s “Dear Mr. Henshaw” to her at bedtime, when she announced she’d had enough. “She said, ‘Dad, that’s it, I’ll take over from here,’ ” Mr. Brozina recalled. “I was, ‘Oh no.’ I didn’t want to stop. We really never got back to reading together after that.”

Mr. Brozina, a single father and an elementary school librarian who reads aloud for a living, did not want the same thing to happen with his younger daughter, Kristen. So when she hit fourth grade, he proposed The Streak: to see if they could read together for 100 straight bedtimes without missing once. They were both big fans of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and on Nov. 11, 1997, started The Streak with “The Tin Woodman of Oz.”

When The Streak reached 100, they celebrated with a pancake breakfast, and Kristen whispered, “I think we should try for 1,000 nights.”

[more] via Generation B – Father and Daughter Bond by Years of Reading – NYTimes.com.